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Statistical Analysis of Terrorism
Harperdog sends in a Miller-McCune story about Aaron Clauset, a researcher whose studies on the statistics and patterns that arise from large numbers of terrorist attacks could help governments better prepare for such conflicts and reduce uncertainty about their frequency and magnitude. Quoting:
"After mapping tens of thousands of global terrorism incidents, he and his collaborators have discovered that terrorism can be described by what mathematicians call a power law. ... Using this power law relationship — called 'scale invariance' — the risk of a large attack can be estimated by studying the frequency of small attacks. It’s a calculation that turns the usual thinking about terrorism on its head. 'The conventional viewpoint has been there is "little terrorism" and "big terrorism," and little terrorism doesn't tell you anything about big terrorism,' Clauset explains. 'The power law says that's not true.' Massive acts of violence, like 9/11 or the devastating 1995 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, obey the same statistical rules as a small-scale IED attack that kills no one, Clauset's work suggests. 'The power law form gives you a very simple extrapolation rule for statistically connecting the two,' he says."
No doubt this sort of analysis will soon be used to plan terrorist attacks.
That might work right up until the planners of the attacks read his paper and change their plans accordingly.
...rather than reaction or "prediction".
The government is very happy letting irrationality dictate discourse. Fear keeps rational discourse out of the conversation. It is much better to have the people think that it is a good idea to duct tape themselves into their homes and suffocate. Fewer trouble makers that way.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
The observation of scale invariance in this kind of data tells you nothing about the short term relationship between low level and high level attacks. Physicists really shouldn't be doing statistics...
Interesting article. I however have a beef with the thought that "“This gives you hope that terrorism is understandable from a scientific perspective.” " Furthermore, I have a problem with his thought that patterns of probability can be seen to develop over time, while not explicitly stating _when_ an attack will happen. To me, that's akin to stating that the San Andreas fault-system will trigger with a mounting probability over the years. Of course it will - as tension builds at some point it's inevitable that the fault will release. When world governments have bad foreign policy (which most seem to have at least some time, if not most of the time), of course you're going to create disenfranchised members of the world community - and when you arm and train them like Al Quaeda & Taliban were when the west wanted them to fight the Soviets they will turn on you. It's not a matter of if, but when. Stating that over time the likelihood of an attack increases seems to not scientific, but rather obvious as somebody (or some group) is almost guaranteed to slip through the security net in place to detect/predict such actions. My $0.02
Statistical analysis shows that the amount of terrorist incidents is actually quite small, but the governments around the world like to exaggerate how many there actually are, to deprive decent hard working people of their freedom and democracy, and pee a lot of money up a wall in the process.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Yes, because of course all terrorists are the same color and come from the same place, and only attack people that are actively engaging them militarily. There's nothing but ignorant generalizations in your post, and personally, I'd take masturbation over nose-picking any day.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
We found that we can't really reduce it to the realm of P, so we can tell you how big the attack might be, it just might take a few decades and hundreds of computers working together. We can get a grant for that right?
so what? earthquakes are also a power law distribution.
doesn't really help in prediction.
These are the same type of guys that gave us statistically accurate risk modeling for the complex derivative securities and we know how well that turned out. One must be careful with mathematical models, especially when you're modeling sentiment.
This is just like all those crap magazines you can buy to show you how to make millions in the stock market. There is always someone willing to look at a graph of past occurrences, draw a line through it, and show you the formula for what happened.
The trick being, of course, that they are all 100% worthless for predicting future trends. The only thing you know in the stock market is this: If a stock is going up, it can continue to go up. Or it might stay the same or go down. The only thing this guy will learn from his analysis is that there might be another terrorist attack. Or there might not. And it might be more, equal, or less severe than previous attacks.
Then they wouldn't be terrorist attacks. The element of surprise is the chief weapon.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Don't forget the white ones. Oh, and the... hey why not just stop invading and killing everyone else?
... misleading, after all many so-called terrorists are merely frustrated people who have not had their voices heard or who have been abandoned by lawless and reckless rulers or who've had their countries unlawfully invaded.
I wonder if these studies check the conditions that these "terrorists" arise out of.
Don't forget the white ones. Oh, and the... hey why not just stop invading and killing everyone else?
Since this thread is on statistical analysis... Statistically speaking there are more brown terrorists than white. Just sayin'.
PS) plus I've never met a brown person that wasn't terrifying!
If the parent was generalizing, her would have said something like Muslims are the terrorists.
Let's say this - if we stopped meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, we'd see a huge reduction in terrorism. Because, in the last 15 years most of the terrorist attacks have been made by Muslims (mostly Arab) pissed off at the US for supporting Israel, being in the Middle East and basically throwing our weight around like we own the Goddamn planet.
Yes, we'll still have to occasional Tim McVeigh or abortion clinic bombing, yeah, yeah, yeah - heard it all before.
Does the quoted author mean the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing?
Or is he just so meta he doesn't even need to get the date right?
An old prof told me that everything is a straight line in the log-log paper. You can literally draw any conclusion you want once you choose the axes to be logarithmic.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Americans seem to ignore the most important stat about terrorism that there is, you are almost infinitely more likely to be killed by an SUV than you are by a terrorist. And yet Americans are uber paranoid about terrorism and yet go apeshit for their shitty ass, ugly, poorly performing, insanely dangerous SUVs. Wake the fuck up people.
Monstar L
into other country's affairs making people mad enough to become so called "terrorists"? Did they they also include all the people such as Osama that the CIA trained then decided to exterminate when they had serve their usefulness? Oh Im pretty sure this will be taken seriously because it has a lot of graphs and math in it. What bunch of American bullshit.
I'd take masturbation over nose-picking any day.
Frankly neither are things that should be done in public.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
This information is useless in terms of predicting a large attack in the short term.
If you flip a coin 100 times each time it has been heads, it doesn't mean the next time its going to be tails.
In the same way, just because lots of small attacks have happened without a large attack doesn't mean a large attack is about to happen.
Guess this methodology is just bullshit then.
I question whether road-side bomb attacks against soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan should be considered terrorism (I am, perhaps wrongly, assuming that most such attacks are against soldiers rather than civilians). If soldiers are being 'terrorised' by the threat of facing bombs, they probably aren't very good soldiers.
or rather, as soon as it starts to work, and stops terrorist attacks...
well then it stops working, doesn't it?
You reply suggests that you misunderstood.
The power law doesn't suggest where and when an attack happens, so it can't stop a single one from happening. Statistics doesn't predict that just like statistical climate laws won't predict whether it rains tomorrow or not.
The power law only says how many attacks will probably happen in the next period of time in a certain large area - within a certain degree of freedom.
And with that infinite wisdom, politicians are able to take appropriate measures. That's the whole point of it.
Today, politicians scream the loudest so that all voters can hear they take the strongest measures against terrorism of all. That may not be necessary when terrorism can be regarded with the same statistics as traffic deaths, plane crashes, diseases and other causes of death.
Maybe in the future politicians will say that it is indeed a little pointless to allocate 20% of the annual governmental budget to prevent 3000 terror-deaths, while the same money could save 100,000 in hospitals if it were to be spent on medicine rather than anti-terror measures. (But maybe that's just my wishful thinking).
Besides, I don't think you can't stop terrorism. You can only motivate people not to be a terrorist in the first place.
Once people cross a line, and decide they want to hurt our society, they will. Somehow.
"'The power law form gives you a very simple extrapolation rule for statistically connecting the two,' he says" ..as long as all terrorists are perfectly spherical and act in a complete vacuum.
Yes, actually, it did; the largest acts of terrorism are perpetrated much less frequently than the smaller ones; for every major bombing, there have been many smaller ones, for every major war, there have been several smaller ones. For every smaller wart, there have been many large acts of non-war violence, etc. down to for every shooting, there have been many aggressive confrontations.
If the power law were not true, most conflicts would escalate; we see they don't, and small events are more likely than large ones.
Terrorism is also threatening to blow people up just because you can. It's also threatening economic sanctions or embargoes if certain ultimatums are not satisfied. By this measure, the United States government is the largest and best funded terrorist organization in the world.
There are a variety ways we express it: an private diplomatic threat, a publicly implied threat, an threat of economic sanctions through the UN (while we ignore UN resolutions against us), military "exercises", CIA coups, and of course, the outright invasions and public threats of invasion.
America is like the local mafia that you have to do business with, or else you could end up like that guy down the street.
According to this 2005 Nature News article about Clauset and his research, the observation that social interactions (deadly feuds) follow a power law distribution dates back at least half a century. Along a similar vein, Neil Johnson (of University of Miami) and research collaborators recently produced a decent model for this kind of distribution (see their paper in Nature from last year).
Engineers also speak PDE, only in a different dialect.
It's like showing a relation between murder and crime. During some period of time there is more likely to be a murder if there is more "other" crimes. A better statistic would be to show the relationship between the size of a country's military and the number of wars it instigates.
... I remembered reading about a study like this years ago. Turns out, I did. http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/21465
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
Statistic should not be used to try and predict phenomena which depend on variables or data that are neither quantifiable nor reliable.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
How about we just stop killing and otherwise pissing off brown-skinned people?
You don't understand what is actually happening. Read Bin Laden's Letter to America. You will see that the actual demand isn't to be "left alone". Bin Laden's first demand is:
Bin Laden demands that we convert to Islam. He follows that up with demands that we ditch the Constitution, implement Islamic Sharia law, and do away with the separation of church and state. Among other things we would have to start killing homosexuals and adulterers, end the charging of interest on bank loans, put an end to drug use, pornography, and alcohol use, amputating the hands of thieves, and many other things. Dressing "immodestly" could get you whipped, which probably means burkas for women. Men would have to grow their beards out, or face a whipping. Crucifixion may be a required punishment for some crimes. Afghanistan under the Taliban was almost ideal to them. If we do not agree to this we can expect that his minions will continue to try to kill us.
It is not especially significant that Bin Laden issued that demand to the United States, in time every country will have to deal with it. Subduing the United States is just one step along their path, and they understand that it could take 500 years. Many countries have been attacked. Stockholm had a suicide bomber this weekend. (Thankfully it appears that one of the Stockholm terrorist's bombs blew prematurely and he couldn't get about five more planted - otherwise it might have been another Madrid, London 7/7, Bali, or similar bombing.)
What Do the Terrorists Want? [A Caliphate]
Good background here.
Ignoring them won't make them go away. They have their own goals - nothing we do other than covert to Islam or fight them will dissuade them. Trying to buy them off or deal with them only delays the inevitable. We are in for a long struggle that will be far bloodier for us if we aren't clear about it. Al Qaeda has a f
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
when you are mismatched n technology and they are pissing you off. Anything you do back n retaliation is terrorism. Stealing from a vendor OMG hes scared now = terrorism, the whole phrase is as bad as the term HACKER...LOOK em both up.
This math should have been kept top secret so the terrorists couldn't use it to plan future attacks where we, using this math, would not expect them to. :-/ Now it's already obsolete.
I'm afraid you are wrong. Compare it to the number of car accident deaths, for example. (and yes I know the source isn't great, but you are welcome to google to your hearts content to see if you can show me how terrorism is more dangerous than driving or riding in a car.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The difficult work in predicting terrorism is getting human intelligence - people on the ground, double agents, infiltrating the terror groups, and getting civilians to tell you the suspicious activity they saw. That is hard, dirty, dangerous work.
Mathematical equations are certainly helpful, and technology is very helpful (see drones), but don't think these things are going to replace HUMINT.
Just because you can get the data to map to a statistical function does not mean the the function is predictive. There are lies, damn lies and this guy.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
If terrorism follows the power law, then that actually just confirms that terrorism is as random as sunspots and global earthquakes.
It's random. Nothing to see here.
You do realise that these are trivial observations and that power laws are everywhere, right? Some people are going as far as to claim that we should stop calling the normal curve by that name, because the power laws seem to be the norm in the universe. And no. Drawing up a nice distribution graph does not help in predicting anything. This work is just more of the same old publish-or-perish. By the way citations to journal articles obey a power law, as does the wealth of people, firms, and nations. The variance in the stock market prices? Power law. To go from the fucking shiny graph to the idea that I CAN PREDICT THE FUTURE!!! is nothing but modern astrology.
It's a question of psychology, not physics, statistics, or politics. The latter three will not convince a rational person to kill, or even harm another person.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
That is one of the worst citation mangling cases I have seen in a while. Moderated troll for only lifting the parts that support your argument from the linked doc and then attempting to speak with authority. Feeble when the sources are one click away.
That is one of the worst citation mangling cases I have seen in a while. Moderated troll for only lifting the parts that support your argument from the linked doc and then attempting to speak with authority. Feeble when the sources are one click away
You are a sad little troll. You aren't part of the Electronic Jihad by any chance? Or maybe simply practicing Taqiyya?
Please read the links. They support my statements, although I wish they didn't. I would prefer that we could live in peace.
Another useful story: What al-Qaida Really Wants.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I'm surprised that this got modded up to 4 - people have not taken the time to critically reflect on the letter that Bin Laden openly promulgated, and when they do, they tend to dismiss it as ravings of a madman. It is not the workings of a madman. It is the work of a very sane, highly intelligent man who happens to be a major figure in a world-wide death cult dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal slaves to a hateful, spite-filled deity known as Allah.
The problem comes about because we in the west would rather look at 'statistical analysis of terrorist attacks' rather than arguing down the obvious insanity of the ideology that drives terrorists.
> Actually, it's very simple: Blowing up innocent people, just because you can, is terrorism.
No--terrorism requires some component of "terror." Blowing up innocent people often qualifies, but not always. For example, blowing up innocent people may be genocide, with an intention of eliminating--rather than terrifying--a population. Or it may be an untempered reaction to being a twenty-year old who's just seen his friends killed--a twenty year old with automatic weapons, who lashes out too easily at a race he dehumanizes because the enemy largely consists of people of that race.
Also, by your definition, terrorism in asymmetric warfare would not count as terrorism--because there, people aren't blowing up innocent people just because they can. They're doing it because they can *And* because it gives them something--a way to fight back against an overwhelming force, or a way to maintain control over their own people, or satisfaction of a perverted concept of honor.
It's very simple and true that blowing up innocent people is wrong--we leave aside the moral dillemna involved in blowing up an innocent person to kill Hitler or Stalin. But that doesn't mean that all blowing up of innocent people is terrorism, nor that all terrorists blow up innocent people.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Now that we have a _so called_ statistical analysis of small scale terrorism and linked it to big boom, most terrorists will deliberately avoid matching up with the statistical predictions in future. (Terrorists may be dumb, but they're not all uneducated and blind!)
There are two things that can happen. Only one can be true since each invalidates the other.
The statistics can account for the fact that terrorists are aware of the statistics and has therefore already accounted for willful attempts at avoiding being at the end of a fed-powered statistic solution. However, this would void the stats for catching terrorists who are unaware of the stats.
What fun lies in double-binds? Who came up with this idea anyway? Certainly not someone who knew what he was thinking!
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Increase education, human rights, and quality of life in those countries and religion - as well as all of the strife, human rights issues, and general pain-in-the-ass retarded ideas (my opinion, YMMV) that come with it - will disappear on its own over time.
How many terrorist attacks of any sort have taken place in Sweden or The Netherlands?
If the people have not only their basic needs met but also have things like a good social safety net they will be far harder to sway to extremist causes that try to change our way of life. (Nationalistic causes, of course, are different and excluded from this.) How many middle class persons of any country - people two or three times above that country's poverty line - have parked an explosives-laden truck next to a building and blown it up? (Note: people who have money like, say, Bin Laden don't count - I don't imagine we'd ever see them do an attack themselves any more than we'd expect the modern leader of a nation to charge into battle at the front of the lines.)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I doubt very much that there is enough terrorism-related data to have much confidence in this analysis. You need quantities lijke the number of words in a book to extract with any confidence Zipfs law or most other power laws. Even then, there are enough deviations from the straight line (on logscale, of course) to make the drawing of conclusions a very interesting job indeed.
Paai
How many terrorist attacks of any sort have taken place in Sweden or The Netherlands?
Sweden had its first suicide bombing this last weekend. The Netherlands have seen a number of killings, perhaps to some disturbing views: Dutch Muslim: 'Murder is normal'.
How many middle class persons of any country - people two or three times above that country's poverty line - have parked an explosives-laden truck next to a building and blown it up?
The middle class are strongly represented among terrorists and leaders of terrorist organizations. Here are just a few examples, there are many more:
“Doctor’s Plot” Trial Examines Unexpected Source for UK Terrorist Attacks
MOHAMMED ATTA - 9/11 Ring Leader
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (MD) - Al-Qaeda's theological leader
It might be easier if this was all about poverty and social safety nets, but that isn't the case. Increasing numbers of young Muslims born and raised in the West are taking up arms and bombs to kill in the name of what they call Jihad. They are being radicalized in Western Europe.
The poverty/terror myth
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
wow. I had no idea people still believed any of that government propaganda.
The media lies to you, and you even realize they lie to you. But you choose to believe this one?
Sure media, you aren't the propaganda broadcast wing of the corrupted government -- thanks for the truth.
The Nairobi US embassy bombing was in 1998: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_U.S._embassy_bombings
Yeah, invading Iraq and Afghanistan was absolutely necessary because otherwise Osama WOULD HAVE CONQUERED THE ENTIRE WORLD!
What's next? Should we make plans for invading the moon since there are crazy people claiming there are aliens there that intend to enslave all of humanity?
There's no doubt that Bin Laden is a fervent Islamist fundamentalist. Without doubt, he will not be satisfied with anything less than the subjugation and conversion of the entire world to Islam. The real question, though, is how does he continue to attract so many followers and so much support? The vast majority of people, no matter their religion, are perfectly happy spending their life living as best they can (being the "sheeple" that some around here seem to detest so much) - they wouldn't have anything to do with such dangerous ideology if there wasn't something driving them to do it. The way that those who want peace can win is by leaving fanatics left all alone.
That is one of the worst citation mangling cases I have seen in a while. Moderated troll for only lifting the parts that support your argument from the linked doc and then attempting to speak with authority. Feeble when the sources are one click away
You are a sad little troll. You aren't part of the Electronic Jihad by any chance? Or maybe simply practicing Taqiyya?
Please read the links. They support my statements, although I wish they didn't. I would prefer that we could live in peace.
Another useful story: What al-Qaida Really Wants.
...
if you want some actual information check out jihadica and the other blogs it links to - guess that's as close as you can get to the sources without actually speaking Arabian.
I think the parent thread is pointing out that in terms of saving lives, money spent on road safety campaigns and improving driving ability might be better value than spending it on counter-terrorism in the way we do right now.
But you also make the fine point that spending money on public health and health education would also be a fine use of that money, perhaps even a better one. It's probably easier to spend money on driver education and reducing road deaths than curing the common cold but anti-poverty measures, better public health care for at-risk populations etc would also be worthwhile spending and as you note probably save many lives.
Quite a few - there was one this week. But perhaps the question you should be asking is this: "how many terrorist attacks are perpetrated by Dutch and Swedish people?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Is becomming a really serious problem coupled with the media-beloved mantra "Scientists say ..."
In general public policy, but particularly:
AGW, corrupt statistics, modeling
Finance, risk, pricing
Health, pandemics, junk pharma, vaxination fear
You have a single intellectual thread, mis-used mathematics and particularly modeling,
unwarrented veneration of authority, fostered by the MSM, and the results of BS research
focused by directed funding.
The root cause is innumeracy, but focused by too much power in too few un-accountable
hands is becomming a real threat to our political process.
Muslims support Bin Laden because he strokes their heartstrings about a hallowed by-gone era when they thought they ruled the world; his reason they don't now is because they aren't Islamic enough. So they send him money and their sons who are dumb enough to think it is a winning proposition.
And they cannot simply be left alone, that's blaming the victim (us). The easy analogy is leaving the Nazies and Japan alone. When they were screwing over small peoples the West didn't care that much about, it was okay. The Nazies and Japan were not satisfied with that, it didn't satisfy their blood lust. Leaving the Musllims extremists alone will not satisfy their blood lust either. The only way they can show the rest of the Muslims that they are their political future is by causing and winning a war with the West. If China were the top dog, they'd be going after them. It isn't personal, war for them is merely a stepping stone to political power. Even Islam itself is irrelevant in this regard to them. It too is merely a (willing) stepping stone. And that is one reason never to trust Islam. Islam has the Breshnev Doctrine: What's mine is mine and what's yours is open to discussion.
.... ...
devastating 1995 bombing of the US embassy
It was in 1997.
You forgot the words 'moon worshippers'. It is vital that next to every mention of 'death cult', you have at least one 'moon worhippers'. Get with the program ! No dessert for you.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Yeah, so he's saying it's a religious issue, not political. I don't know, but I don't think we should take what most people say - terrorists especially - at face value. They have people to rally, too. Bin Laden's just a demagogue campaigning and gathering support, therefore he paints his crusade as a... well, a crusade, with holy goals, when in fact it's more like a... well, a crusade, in that it was very profitable for the church. Oh.
I don't know why you think it means that. It sure as hell doesn't say that. After all, the excerpt you quoted mentions attacks that kill nobody. Just apply some common sense and you'll see that even an infinite number of those wouldn't equate to a single large attack causing hundreds of fatalities. Comprehension fail.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's interesting that GP was modded Troll. Maybe poor wording, but what he's hinting at is valid, even after your argument (which I agree to in specific details but not as a whole). Hell, I know people who were victims of suicide bombings (from when a Synagogue was destroyed across the street from my apartment) that still think that the West is at fault.
Sharia and the idea of jihad have always existed. They also exist or existed in various forms in almost every dominating culture.
I have Muslim friends, relatives and colleagues, some of whom share the ideas you say that motivate those terrorists. I also have acquaintances of other beliefs that have that kind of extreme passion against other groups. Still, I don't see these people willing to do anything even slightly practical towards realizing their beliefs. People just want to see a coherent picture when they look at the world and seeing black and white is just very convenient. That's all there is to it. People I know who supposedly hate Jews and Europeans prefer to do business with them when the opportunity arises, just because they're more trustworthy in their dealings.
In short, you won't find Muslims that are not from oppressed regions involved in terrorist attacks. Also, Muslims from oppressed regions will attack their supposed oppressors. You don't see a Chechen terrorist making a suicide attack against the U.S., just as you don't see a Iraqi blow himself/herself up in Moscow. No Iranian or Turkish terrorists acting internationally either.
In this picture, I don't see anything hinting to an ideology as the trigger. These people think they are retaliating against something that happened in their lifetime, something that they think is responsible for their suffering. They happen to group around an ideology, which is to be expected. And Islam is pretty convenient. If I have time, I will try to find studies that suggest that these terrorists usually are not very religious before they join these organizations, and also some studies supporting the idea that religion itself is not the instigator.
So, it's not about Bin Laden's demands. He could be demanding anything, it doesn't prove anything. Would there be organized terrorism if the West had not fucked with the Middle East? Most likely no. Will the attacks stop if the West stops messing with them? Most likely no.
Going back to the old pirates and emperors/terrorism vs. freedom fighter argument, do the stats still stand up if you define terrorism differently or use another dataset? No complex system has been reduced to a "very simple extrapolation".
What China will do IRL is go in and fix things the West has broken, make deals with them and get their resources. Don't delude yourself.
They have their own goals - nothing we do other than covert to Islam or fight them will dissuade them
The question is: what is the best way to fight them?
It is certainly not any application of the War Model, which involves massive invasions of random countries, some of which--like Iraq--were strongly opposed to Islamic radicalism.
Since you have identified the threat so clearly and are obviously concerned with it, I'm curiuous as to what you think the best way to oppose it is, and would also be interested to see any of your anti-war writings.
Education, urbanization and women's rights are all important things in fighting nutjobs like bin Laden. Funny cartoons work pretty well too, and I've often felt the West should issue an ultimatum to al Qaeda: "The funny pictures will continue until the killing stops."
That no one takes this idea seriously is a measure of how stupid and irrational everyone involved in the "debate" has become. Violence is always the least efficient, least effective means of settling any dispute between humans, but unreflective, stupid people always use it as their first resort.
The past decade has demonstrated conclusively how ineffective War Model violence is at stemming the tide of Islamic terrorism, and equally conclusively shown how effective ordinary police and intelligence work is.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
reverse the causal chain. If you see a lot of small terrorist activity, it is because terrorist activity is higher and when it's higher, you should expect more bigger attacks too.
The cause being whatever is making terrorism a more useful option. E.g. higher oppression, greater international tension, invasion or natural crisis causing displacement will all lead to more unrest which, if there is no outlet for it, will release itself as violence and hence terrorism.
And by looking at the more numerous small events you can see whether this is happening with more rapidity than you would by using the less frequent but more visible bigger terrorist attacks.
And then you can either hole up and avoid the problem or try amelioration before a big hit turns up.
Meh, I've never been particularly impressed by China's methods of fixing problems caused by the West. If that's the best fate the Middle East gets to hope for, well, best of luck to them with that.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
So what happened with the mayor today? Suicide?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
You want to know where the next terrorist act will take place?
Just ask the Mossad.
Fer feck's saik!
Is anybody really still fooled by this bullshit? Because, as we know, governments NEVER plan in secret or attempt to manipulate the populace.
Why haven't those monsters been hauled out by their scrotums yet?
Sheesh.
-FL
Well, I don't imagine China to help out countries where the primary demand is freedom of speech.
In the context of this statistics discussion, I think you may be missing his point. Of course what Bin Laden wants is absurd and deserves to be fought, but is taking over two countries and sending daily drone strikes into a third country the correct amount of response?
There have been several reports (one from the CIA if I recall correctly) that estimate that our two wars and the drone strikes are creating more terrorists than they are killing. We seem to be making things worse.
Watch the movie Restrepo when you get a chance. Just came out on Netflix. It follows one unit in the early days of the Afghanistan war. Pertinent to this discussion is the part of the story describing their mission with the highest US casualties. It was just after bombing a house full of innocent people. They quite literally turned up the heat on themselves through one act. That, I think, is our war on terror in a nutshell.
Converting to Islam wouldn't make them stop, either. Oh, it would change the rhetoric all right, it might change the emphasis and some of the cast, but the terror would keep going. Al-Qaeda have shown many, many times that they have no issues with killing fellow Muslims.
When you strip away all the rhetoric and self-delusion, it's a turf war. It's about "who calls the shots in my back yard". As long as American companies insist on trying to exploit their oil and other minerals, import their food, run factories in their countries according to their own rules, and generally interfere with other peoples' inalienable rights to tyrannise and brutalise their own populations... there will be resistance.
Then I'll summarize and I might get hit with a FLamebait for this, but if people have their basic needs met and are generally happy they won't resort to extremist shit like blowing themselves up in the first place.
Okay, so there's the odd dude who's moderately well off who wants to take out some infidels, but if you are positing in any way that that makes up the majority of people who actually carry out terrorist attacks (planning != carrying out), then I call bullshit.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I'm sure they get a fair few less regardless, but yes that was what I had intended to get across. Refer to my timestamp for a reference towards my frame of mind. :)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Okay, so there's the odd dude who's moderately well off who wants to take out some infidels, but if you are positing in any way that that makes up the majority of people who actually carry out terrorist attacks (planning != carrying out), then I call bullshit.
Sorry.
Research Reveals New Profile of Suicide Bombers
Just as the educated tend to make better workers, they also make "better" terrorists.
The extremists have different beliefs, priorities, and concerns. Although they believe they are destined to rule the world, that their way is best and just, that Allah is on their side, only 1/6 the world believe in Islam, the mighty Islamic empire of 1,000 years ago is fallen, the Caliphate was dissolved 90 years ago, and immoral Westerners are rich and powerful. It vexes them, and they intend to put the world right.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The Power Law is essentially the inverse of the Bell Curve, another statistical mapping that accurately measures the occurrence of events but doesn't provide any predictive power.
The power law also applies to phase changes of elements.It accurately represents the locations of molecules. The regular old bell curve applies to the locations of molecules when the phase isn't changing. The folks at the Santa Fe Institute think that because Power Laws show up everywhere they are amazing but the SFI folks aren't so amazed at the old bell curve showing up on the perimeter of every place the power law appears.
It is descriptive, not predictive.